Princeton Review ranks Brown students as the happiest. GQ named Brown America's "Douchiest" College, and the Huffington Post proclaimed the University one of the 10 most intellectual.
Over the years, Brown has received a number of other notable rankings, from fifth best college radio station to the 18th best quality of life. But Brown's international ranking has actually been decreasing annually. Brown has fallen 12 spots in the QS World University Rankings, from 27 to 39, between 2008 and 2010.
London-based Quacquarelli Symonds Limiteds ranks colleges based on "research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are," according to its website.
This is the first year that QS and the Time Higher Education, whose collaboration has previously produced some of the most anticipated and influential international rankings, have come out with separate lists. THE expressed concern that QS rankings "rely too heavily on subjective surveys of scholars and employers, and not enough on hard indicators of excellence."
THE's new system is based on "teaching, research, citations, industry income and international mix," according to its website. THE claims this method "places more weight on hard measures of excellence, rather than reputation and heritage."
THE placed Brown at 55 out of 200 universities, or in the 73rd percentile, while QS's ranking of 39 out of 100 put Brown in the 61st percentile. One similarity between the two is that Brown was consistently ranked as the second to last Ivy League school, placed only above Dartmouth.
Though the University's international rankings have fallen, the number of applicants overall has increased. A record number of over 30,000 applied for the class of 2014, up 20 percent from the last year.
The number of international students has also been on the rise, said Dean of Admissions Jim Miller '73. The number of international applicants "grew significantly last year," an increase that has been a "multi-year trend," Miller said — despite the lowering international ranking.
According to a study on what matters to international students applying to universities in the United States, more international students are applying to stateside schools. But school rankings were not among the top 10 factors that international students value most.
Despite their many differences, neither international nor domestic students place heavy weight on rankings. The UCLA Freshman Survey: Fall 2009 found that college rankings were only the 12th most important factor to American students deciding which school to attend.
Miller said he believes that the reasons each group of students chooses Brown are relatively similar.
"My sense is — and this is anecdotal — that the kind of intellectual engagement and the ability to be intellectually entrepreneurial ... appeals equally to international student as well as U.S. students," he said. One key difference that he did note was that the "Brown curriculum has even more appeal" to international students because it is unique. A number of international universities require students to commit to their field of study before even entering the institution.
Miller said he was not concerned about Brown's decline in international ranking because organizations "look at institutions in different ways, depending on what they're studying and what they're looking at," he said.
But Miller believes that the variation in rankings benefits students because "they can give people different views of institutions."
